Google on a mission to preserve art with its gigapixel ‘Art Camera’

Photography is definitely an art form, but it is also a medium to document history. It has evolved over the years and today almost anyone and everyone is taking pictures and technically ‘making history’. Google is making the best use of this tool to preserve a variety of paintings and artwork by taking their pictures.

This new project aims to convert valuable works of art into a digital format. Google’s Cultural Institute not only wants to protect, but also wants to bring the world’s culture online. The company has invented something called the “Art Camera,” a special robotic camera which can capture gigapixel images which means every single detail, down to the very brushstrokes, will be captured.

This camera takes hundreds and thousands of high-resolution pictures and uses a laser and a sonar system to focus. The sonar system is used to calculate the distance of the robotic camera to get a better positioning. After numerous pictures are taken, all of them are arranged, assembled and stitched through Google’s own software.

The first thousand images from this project are now available for free public viewing, so people can get a realistic experience of these artworks. Ben John, an engineer at Google Cultural Institute says ‘Zooming into these images is the closest thing to walking up to the real thing with a magnifying glass.’

The first 200 of these images took about five years which is a lot of time, but since the introduction of the robotic camera, the whole process has become swift. It takes about 30 minutes to scan a whole painting which earlier used to take a day. This means that Google can now efficiently increase the number of images that have been made available and Google says that it has already scanned another 1,000 images in the past few months with its new cameras.

The Google Cultural Institute website offers artwork by famous artists like Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Monet and a variety of museums across Australia, India, the Netherlands, Brazil and more.